You Won’t Believe What Kazakhstan Plans Next for Crypto (It’s Not More Borat!)

by

Picture this: Kazakhstan — land of endless steppe, dashing horsemen, and now, if First Vice Minister Kanysh Tuleushin has his way, the soon-to-be de facto casino of Central Asia’s digital world. In a recent dispatch to the Kazakhstanskaya Pravda (the sort of scandal-sheet Jeeves might peruse over his morning tea), Tuleushin hinted that, with a spot of bureaucratic twitching and the removal of some rather beastly restrictions, Kazakhstan could become Central Asia’s crypto command centre. Or, at the very least, a place where one could buy a cup of tea with Bitcoin and not be frowned at by the local babushka. 🤔

The general wheeze, as Tuleushin scribbles it, is to sprinkle a bit of modern policy here, waft in a draft of digital mining there, and before you can say “blockchain ledger,” voilà – Kazakhstan is riding at the front of the regional innovation parade. One could almost picture the President himself donning VR goggles and waving from a blockchain float. If they legalize trading and take a scythe to those pesky regulations, it might rain tenge on the national budget like a monsoon at a garden party. 💸

Tuleushin, never one to pass up a touch of ceremony, is clamouring for rules across the nation, squeaky-clean exchanges, and legal crypto ATMs — presumably so you can cash out your Dogecoins with some dignity and a receipt.

Crypto Miners: The Unlikely Knights of the Power Grid

On to the modernisation front: our man Tuleushin claims crypto mining firms could, if suitably corralled, work wonders for Kazakhstan’s energy grid. Rather like getting your senile uncle to power the household by pedalling furiously on a stationary bicycle — but with more computers and, regrettably, fewer biscuits.

He points to the enigmatic “70/30 energy initiative,” which basically means foreign chaps pay for snazzy thermal upgrades, 70% of the juice keeps the lights on nationwide, while the remaining 30% is siphoned off for miners to keep their Bitcoin factories buzzing and their pockets jingling.

Bonus round: Kazakhstan could use leftover gas from oil fields to keep data centres humming! Less pollution, more petrol-drenched earnings, and not a whiff of the traditional “Borat” stereotype in sight. Gas power and crypto – the modern-day bread and circuses! 😅

Apparently, the crypto mining business has already coughed up a tidy $34.6 million in taxes — which, knowing government recordkeeping, probably purchases a few reasonably fancy teapots. By 2023, the ledger boasted 415,000 mining contraptions, 84 licenses issued, and five accredited mining pools. It’s practically a club now! 🍵

Trading on Astana’s International Financial Centre (AIFC) shot up from a modest $324 million in 2023 to a positively indecent $1.4 billion in 2024. By 2025, miners will have to offload 75% of their shiny new coins courtesy of AIFC, much like donating to the church plate, but with crypto.

Regulation Shmegulation: The Wild Wild East

Yet, despite all this forward motion, the average crypto transaction is still slinking around the shadows, outside the Imperial Gaze of Regulation. In 2023 alone, $4.1 billion worth of digital shenanigans zipped through unregulated, with over nine-tenths avoiding the long arm of bureaucracy — a fact that doubtless keeps at least one civil servant awake at night with palpitations. 😳

The authorities responded in time-honoured fashion: 36 illegal exchanges shut down, $4.8 million in murky lucre frozen, and a couple of Ponzi schemes stuffed back in their respective Pandora’s boxes.

And because every good bureaucrat likes a digital side project, Kazakhstan’s central bank is cobbling together its own Central Bank Digital Currency, currently known as “digital tenge.” The inaugural release is slated for 2025. Mark your calendars and your wallets!

Kazakhstan isn’t alone in its ambitions: neighbours like Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan are also getting a taste for this cryptographic highlife. On May 7, Binance (the international crypto juggernaut and occasional party-crasher) shook hands with Kyrgyzstan’s investment bigwigs to introduce crypto payment doodads and, one hopes, a crash course on “What Even Is Blockchain, Anyway?” 📚

Read More

2025-05-14 14:58